About a year earlier, the bank posted a for sale sign, fueling rumors that the IRS was selling Guido’s assets to claim back taxes-no real surprise-but there were few nibbles. Except from Caroline Sturgis.
The price tag was two million dollars for a house, the greenhouse, and a shop on two acres. That was where Caroline had seen our new partnership taking root. And that was where Grant Sturgis thought he and I should meet, since his house was still being staked out by the media and mine was out of the question.
Springfield had a flinty and very savvy real estate broker named Roxy Rhodes. A tiny woman, she powered around town behind the wheel of a cream-colored Bentley with vanity plates and wore tight suits and lots of jewelry, including a ring with the initials RR in diamonds, which would have looked like brass knuckles on anyone else her size, but somehow she pulled it off.
Unlike Gretchen Kennedy’s real estate office, Roxy never needed my quickie curbside face-lifts for her listings. They all had sticker prices of well over a million dollars and they were staged as carefully as movie sets. And Roxy could smell interest in a property the way a dog could smell a slice of pizza. Caroline had reeked of serious interest, so Roxy had given her the combination to the locked box on the door of Guido’s main building. She let Caroline go in as often as she liked, to measure things and fantasize, until Roxy knew Caroline was so emotionally invested in the place that she couldn’t live without it. I’d passed the place a number of times and seen Caroline’s car in the small lot near the main building.
Caroline had written the combination on the massive whiteboard in her kitchen, and that must have given her husband the idea that we could meet there and not be seen.
I’d agreed to meet him that night-less vehicular traffic than in the daytime and less of a chance the neighborhood kids roughhousing on their way from their school bus stop would be nosing around the nursery as they sometimes did. In the meantime I went home to eat, change, and figure out what I was going to say to a man who’d just been told that his wife wasn’t the person he thought.
My house wasn’t a Roxy Rhodes home. It was a small bungalow well beneath her customary price range and probably unsalable to anyone with serious money or a family because of its small size and quirky layout. But it served a single woman well, especially one who had few pieces of furniture and few friends in the area. And it had a lovely garden that bordered a bird sanctuary on one side and a protected wetlands on another.
At about 8:30 I grabbed an old leather bomber jacket from the closet and headed back out. My place was only fifteen minutes from Guido’s, but I parked four blocks away and walked the rest to escape anyone’s notice. There was one car in the lot of the deli, diagonally across from the nursery. Probably the deli clerk’s. Now that I was one of them, I didn’t know how any of these small businessmen stayed alive.
The last time I’d been to Guido’s, I’d found the proprietor with a garden tool stuck in his back. It hadn’t been pleasant. I took a deep breath and tried the door. It creaked open, the locked box from the real estate office hanging, opened, on a rusty hinge.
The front of the store, about twenty by twenty, held an unplugged refrigerated unit and a small cash and wrap area I remembered well. I flashed back to the way it had looked when Guido Chiaramonte was still alive, with dozens of Styrofoam crosses and funeral wreaths hanging from the ceiling. In color, instead of the black and white created by time, dust, and death.
A few wicker baskets and metal cemetery pots, now covered with cobwebs, still hung on the pegboard walls. The store was dark and smelled faintly of something familiar that I couldn’t put my finger on. Sixty feet away at the far end of the barracks-like building, I saw a quivering blue light.
My cell phone rang and I fished it out of my backpack; I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“I hope that’s you out there.”
My sentiments exactly. Grant Sturgis was calling from the back of the nursery. I tiptoed over broken pots, weeds that had cropped up through the pea gravel, and the occasional lump of something that felt like a squished pinecone but might have been a dead mouse. My boots crushed some vegetation that blanketed the floor. Then I recognized the smell. It was oregano, covering the ground like a thick carpet and releasing its fragrance every time I stepped on a clump. In the back of the building, Grant Sturgis sat huddled at an old potting table, clutching his phone. He flicked on a Coleman lantern he must have brought from home. The shadows it threw on his face made him look only more haggard.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, pointing to a chair.
“I’m not sure how long I can stay. I’m not really the nervous type, but this place is a little creepy.” I pulled out the desk chair and used an old seed catalog I found on the table to brush off the dust as best as I could. Then I sat down.
Sturgis looked as if he hadn’t slept since the last time I saw him, rocking back and forth on his family room sofa. I thought of asking how he was, but even in the dark I could see he looked like crap, so it was pointless to ask.
“Why am I here?”
Grant blew out deeply as if emptying his lungs of all air like a leaking balloon. He cleared his throat and began to speak.
“Two weeks ago I had a wonderful life,” he said, shaking his head. “People kept telling me I had the best of both worlds. I must have heard that dozens of times over the years.”
I bet he had. He had his own successful consulting business, which seemed impervious to the economic downturn; he traveled as much as he wanted, whenever he wanted; and he had a wonderful family to come home to. A year or so ago Caroline had suspected he was having an affair, but happily it turned out to be a misunderstanding. Their marriage seemed to be a good one. Until this.
He composed himself. “And then something happens that you’d never expect in a million years. You think if something is going to happen, it’ll be to one of your kids-heaven forbid, an accident, drugs, some weird Internet business. You never think it’s going to be something-” He broke down a little, then shook it off.
I felt for him, I really did. I also felt the dust in the room resettling on my face and in my eyes. I hated being there and ached to get away, but there was no tactful way to do it while the poor man was spilling his guts. And in a perverse way, like the drivers who couldn’t help but look at the aforementioned roadkill, I wanted to hear what he had to say. What did he want from me?
“You know how Caroline and I met?” he asked. “We were in South Beach. She was one of those sun-kissed girls in a bikini top and shorts having coffee and reading the paper at a hip café on Ocean Drive.”
He told me that she was on her own in Florida, and so was Grant. After three days of furtive smiles and shy waves, he worked up the courage to talk to her and was in heaven when she didn’t shoot him down. She told him she’d recently graduated from Bloedell University in Oregon and that she was an orphan, raised by her maternal grandmother who’d just died. The grandmother had left her a little money and she was in Florida trying to decide what to do next-go to graduate school or travel around.
Pretty clever, in retrospect. Oregon was as far away from Florida as you could get, and she claimed to have gone to a small school where not many people were likely to say, “Oh, you must know so-and-so.”
And she had her own money.
“She even said something about the Oregon Beavers and I believed her. It was all a lie. She’s not an orphan. Her mother is dead but her father and brother still live in Michigan. A town called Okemos.”
Half of him was angry and the other half shattered. What must it be like to learn that everything you thought you knew about your spouse was untrue? That you didn’t really know her at all? If the rest of Springfield was in shock, what was Grant Sturgis feeling?